Robert
Heinlein’s long and varied book, Time Enough for Love,
featuring the immensely long-lived Lazarus Long, was published in May
1973. Like the prototype for this character, Edgar Rice
Burroughs’
similarly unaging John Carter of Mars, Lazarus is a perpetual
adolescent who never grows up and never grows old.

That February,
after the book had been announced but before it was published, Cory
and I wrote an essay also called “Time Enough for Love,” pointing to
issues of maturation in Heinlein’s earliest stories which had reached a
peak in his original Lazarus Long novel, Methuselah’s Children.
This story about the first human trip to the stars was serialized
in Astounding
in 1941 and then published in book form in 1958 with a rewritten ending.

In
both versions of the story, there is a crucial confrontation with a
higher being which Lazarus cannot face, intimations of human alteration
he cannot accept, and a hasty return from the stars.

The problem
is Lazarus Long’s attachment to himself as he is. Like a
teen-age kid
unprepared for adult responsibility, he just isn’t ready to grow up
yet. But the 1958 version of the story ends with a resolve
that
someday he will be, even if it takes him another thousand years.

If Time Enough
for Love was to be an honest success, Heinlein would have
to redeem his authorial promise and deal with the unfinished business
of Methuselah’s
Children.
Lazarus would have to go back to the Temple of Kreel and do better at
dealing with the Gods of the Jockaira than he’d done the first time
around.

If he looked for his key where he dropped it, then he had a chance to
redeem the evasion, denial and retreat of Methuselah’s Children.
However, if he never went back to the Temple of Kreel, but just used
his uniquely long life for endless centuries of more-of-the-same --
going round and round in circles locked in his own self-regard --
fighting, fucking and flimflamming forever, and never learning what the
Gods of the Jockaira had to teach him -- Lazarus would never grow up,
and Heinlein’s book would be a
failure.

When Time
Enough for Love
was published in May, we were disappointed to see that Lazarus doesn’t
use his centuries well. He never returns to the Temple of
Kreel. And
he never learns what the Gods of the Jockaira know that he doesn’t.

All that time. All those experiences. And he’s still not
ready.

Heinlein set a challenge for himself in Methuselah’s Children
but then didn’t deal with it in Time Enough for Love.
What was the hangup?

In “Reading Heinlein Subjectively,” written on the heels of the
publication of Time
Enough for Love
in June 1973, we put together Heinlein’s stories, human growth
psychology and the inner nature of science fiction in search of an
answer.

The essay was published in Science
Fiction Review in May 1974. SFR
was consistently the top fanzine of its day under a series of different
titles, voted a Hugo six times. Its editor, Richard Geis, won
another
seven Hugos as best fanwriter. To our dismay, however, Geis
-- without
changing a word of what we’d written -- had re-paragraphed the essay
throughout in a way that made it more difficult to read.

The day
the issue arrived, I took the magazine along with me on the bus from
Frenchtown, New Jersey to New York City. Waiting in the line ahead of
me to board the bus was Alfred Bester, author of the two most dazzling
science fiction novels of the Fifties, the Hugo-winning The Demolished Man
and The Stars
My Destination. This was the only time we were
ever on that bus together.

I’d
met Bester once. With Cory and writer Jack Dann, I’d spent a
couple of
hours in his company one afternoon. Presuming on that small
acquaintance, I handed him the magazine and asked him to read the essay
on the bus ride.

We didn’t sit together, and Bester handed the
magazine back when we got off at Port Authority. I don’t
remember now
what he said to me, but it might have been to ask if our essay had been
tinkered with editorially.

He wrote a letter about it to Science Fiction Review
taking them to task for having messed with the essay. He said
that it
couldn’t have been conceived of, let alone written, in the form in
which it appeared. And Dick Geis bowed to the rarity of a
comment from
Alfred Bester and apologized for having “improved” the piece.
I’ll
always appreciate both of them for that, Alfred Bester not only for
seeing what he had and being right about it but for speaking up as he
did,
and Dick Geis for admitting that he might have made a mistake.

A
few weeks later, after Robert Heinlein had finished delivering a talk
at the Poetry Center in New York City and was autographing books -- but
before I found my own opportunity to speak to him -- a cheeky young fan
named Gary Farber asked him if he had read our essay in the latest
issue of SFR.
According to Farber, Heinlein replied coolly, “I do not read fan
magazines.”

Nonetheless, Heinlein kept a copy of this issue of SFR in his Panshin
file. So possibly he did read it after all.